Statement On Desktop Accessibility Development

Addendum — 26 August 2008

Functioning today as the Open A11y Workgroup
in The Linux Foundation, We offer this brief update to reaffirm the vision
and commitment expressed in our Statement On Desktop Accessibility
Development.

We are pleased to note that we are moving forward toward making our
expressed commitment a daily reality for persons who require accessibility
support in their computing environments. In particular a generous grant from
the Mozilla Foundation, together with ongoing mentoring support from Sun
Microsystems, Inc. -- creators and
maintainers of AT-SPI -- enabled CodeThink to provide our Workgroup with an engineering study that
demonstrated the practicality of moving AT-SPI
from CORBA to D-Bus. Our agreement to move AT-SPI
to D-Bus will remove a major impediment to the realization of our vision.
We are greatly pleased, therefore, that funding from Nokia Corporation is
enabling CodeThink to effect this transition, which is expected to be
ready for testing during 2009. Additional details can be found on the
Open A11y's D-Bus Wiki.

September 21, 2005

We are members of the GNOME and KDE Accessibility Projects, and also of the
Free Standards Group's Accessibility Workgroup (FSG Accessibility). We have
prepared this statement in order to clarify the plans and intentions of our
projects with respect to interoperability and standardization. We believe
this statement accurately reflects the consensus viewpoint of the individual
members of our groups.

We wish to allay any concern that our standardization efforts might be
focused on any one particular toolkit or desktop technology to the
exclusion of other toolkits and desktops. We believe it is imperative to
preserve choice and to maximize available options for users. Therefore we are
developing an accessibility standard based on functional performance criteria
implemented in messaging protocols fully independent of any particular
toolkit or desktop technology. We believe users who are persons with
disabilities should be empowered to choose technologies from any and all
environments which provide accessibility just as other desktop users
today routinely use a mix of technologies from different desktop
environments. Our goal is seamless interoperability.

While some of the accessibility interfaces being discussed as candidates for
standardization within FSG Accessibility, primarily AT-SPI, originated in GNOME, we as a group are committed to
toolkit-neutral accessibility interface standards. A key goal of our ongoing
standardization effort, which is inclusive rather than exclusive, is the
long-term interoperability of accessibility solutions for the free desktop
environment. The current KDE4 roadmap, for example, calls for interoperability
with existing GNOME assistive technologies, using the AT-SPI bridge of Qt4. The KDE Accessibility Project also plans
to port its own assistive technologies to AT-SPI so that GNOME users can benefit from them. The GNOME
team is excited about this commitment and the willingness of the KDE
developers to integrate technologies that originated within GNOME in those
cases where they offer immediate tangible benefits to users.

At the same time, we are actively working together to develop and implement a
strategy which will eliminate dependencies on any particular desktop,
library, or toolkit, including KDE accessibility on GNOME libraries, or vice
versa. The current plan of action, which was agreed to at a face-to-face meeting of FSG Accessibility during
January 2005, is to standardize on a set of interfaces (most likely
specified in IDL), and allow for multiple conformant implementations as long as
basic interoperability requirements are met. This will allow for increased
technology sharing and help future-proof our
standardization efforts.